Blue & Yellow Post

Working with sparkle March 19, 2008

The quickest way to make a connection is definitely not by using an ADSL broadband connection courtesy of one of the countless internet providers, but rather by using the right hand side of the brain

, and a bit of sparkle.

My fabulous friend James has patiently spent three separate sessions sorting out my ADSL broadband connection. Taking that long, because he had to systematically diagnose which bits of which puzzle didn’t work with which bits of which other puzzle.

The process was exhausting but rewarding. Whilst I kept him plied with gin, all I could do was marvel at his resilience and systematic discipline.

And the best part is that I am now on the net! Or as my friend Sparkles would call it, the interweb.

James and I have another blog called Working with Sparkle. The postings are about communication processes, systems, tricks of the trade, provocative ideas and war stories. We do it by blogging, simply because it’s the way we both think well. We think with a tale. Not a fairy tale. Nor a dog-wagging tail. Just a tale.

The idea of running a concurrent blog came about whilst James was conducting his diagnostic process to connect me to the net. As I listened to him tell the annoyingly calm trouble shooter from Internode, that yes he had tried all the things he was now being asked to do again, I had an epiphany. A blinding moment of insight. A bright blue moment of connecting thoughts, slap dang in the middle of our removing one ethernet cable to replace it with another wired router cable in some other portal of blah blah blah.

At that stage, Sparkles just wanted a hammer.

Who is Sparkles? And what’s he got to do with connections?

Sparkles made an appearance on the flight from Armidale to Sydney. James and I work together and we were returning from an excruciatingly long working weekend. The weekend had been full of repeatable – how many times do I have to tell you -messaging; impossible sales pitches and endless doubt on the part of what was starting to resemble an entire army of website users. Mind you this is typical for the sort of marketing we’ve been forced to do.

So there we were, on the plane. Exhausted. We watched a perfectly lovely steward demonstrate the bells and whistles attached to his yellow life-saving vest. You’ll recall that mind-numbing moment (for them) when they put on that yellow vest for the 50,000th time, and pull on one tag, whilst blowing on one other whistle, whilst juggling one further rope.

And in a flash of creativity, James envisioned a congo line of 30 such stewards, given bells, whistles, perhaps a feather or two, a sparkle and tiny touch of bling, to ensure they had no trouble getting attention. He quietly whispered just one word to me – Sparkle. Where the vision came from, we’re not sure, but it was an insane moment which made us both explode with laughter – and gave us a fabulous metaphor for our communication work. If you want to get attention – work with sparkle.

My own communication tenet has always been about engaging others to make the outcomes stick and last. Often my work is a bit left of field, shaking them up, making grownups paint with colour to make the unlikely connection between their company’s goals and the encroaching environments of change. I’m a firm believer that it is no good me being a hero or a legend, if it all falls apart the moment I’ve gone.

My partner in crime, James follows an equally empassioned truth – the art of diagnosis. His is a more incisive, more challenging art, because it pares back the situation in order to make the correct and systematic reading of a problem. When done correctly, this makes the solution all the easier to find and match and the subsquent roll-out more factual and enduring.

So working with sparkle is just that: a bit of dash to get us started, a few bells and whistles to get attention, but in the end an adjustment to systems, metaphoric routers and cables, and above all blissful sustainable connection to the whole wide world of possibilities.

Thank you James – this blog is for you.